The ongoing advancements witnessed in information technology continue to provide tremendous efficiencies and opportunities to business owners. For example, businesses can communicate electronically in a variety of ways, such as via electronic mail, text message or short message service and instant messaging. Further to this, the opportunities to electronically transmit previously or separately recorded communications, in the form of digital images, has grown exponentially, such as via the use of scanned paper documents, digital voicemail and video files, all of which are presentable in a wide range of electronic formats.
While these advantages have improved may business processes, they have also created their own set of problems. In particular, the total amount of recorded information created and possessed by businesses has drastically increased. Of this, about 93% of all data is now created initially on computers, and while this data is recorded on some form of storage media, most of it is never printed out. In fact, it is estimated that over 4 trillion emails are generated per day in the United States. Such levels and volume of data are historically unprecedented.
Unfortunately, this exponential increase in electronic data also means that the costs to meet the procedural requirements of discovery during litigation have skyrocketed, not to mention that the process has become extraordinarily complex, burdensome and risky to the businesses involved in the legal case.
In effect, the overlap of advancing technology with traditional legal roles has made both in-house and outside counsel vulnerable and uneasy with managing the discovery process, as the consequences of a misstep can be severe. For example, in Qualcomm Inc. v. Broadcom Corp., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 57136 (S.D. Cal. Aug. 6, 2007), the Court found by clear and convincing evidence that Qualcomm counsel participated in an organized program of litigation misconduct and concealment throughout discovery, trial, and post-trial before new counsel took over. In In re Seroquel Products Liability Litigation, 2007 WL 2412946 (M.D. Fla. Aug. 21, 2007), the Court sanctioned AZ for not “[I]dentifying relevant records [databases] and working out technical methods for their production” and for “purposeful sluggishness” in delaying production. In Phoenix Four, Inc. V. Strategic Res. Corp., 2006 WL 1409413 (S.D.N.Y. May 23, 2006), it was shown that, despite counsel's due diligence, they missed a “hidden partition” on a server that contained relevant information. Although counsel disclosed it immediately and produced expediently, the court found the behavior unreasonable. In Garcia v. Berkshire Life Ins. Co. of America, 2007 WL 3407376 (D. Colo. Nov. 13, 2007), plaintiff's counsel produced ten email strings and two attachments to the defendant, along with a privilege log listing 135 additional emails and documents. In several meet and confers, the defendant told plaintiff that the DVD contained thousands of emails but produced no further emails. In defending a motion to compel, Plaintiff “essentially [plead] technical incompetence with respect to computers.” The Court held that if counsel was technically ignorant, he had a duty to seek competent professional assistance to ascertain the contents of the DVD. Lastly, in Victor Stanley v. Creative Pipe, Inc., 250 F.R.D. 251 (D. Md. 2008), U.S. Magistrate Judge Grimm held that defendants “failed to demonstrate that the keyword searches they performed on the text-searchable ESI was reasonable” and that the “privilege/protection was waived by the voluntary production of the documents to [plaintiffs] by defendants.”
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and method of providing comprehensive document review, production and reporting that not only controls costs but increases defensibility of the overall process to reduce overall risk. The present invention satisfies this need.